PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi

Juha Suonpää
SACRED PLACES
2–25 May 2008
Open: Tue-Fri 12–17, Sat-Sun 12–16

Although one might be tempted to think of the Eiffel Tower as a single, unambiguous place, this would be misleading, for a photograph is capable of creating different relations between place and space out of the same subject. As a performance grounded in pictorial reproduction, the ritual of photography employs the bodies of tourists as resources and market places for the production of social meanings. Tourist sights, as we know them, arise through a process of interaction that is constantly in motion in the worlds of visual, social and bodily phenomena. As MacCannell notes, they are a modern ritual of the present-day world and its projection. The tourists who come from all over the world to a particular destination transform it into a stage, but not for the performance of just anything or for it to take place in any manner whatsoever. It is pictures consecrated to the Western culture that circulate there, produced partly with the help of the romantic gaze, the heroic gaze and the family gaze.

My ten-year ethnographic photography project has been a process in which I have acted simultaneously as photographer, researcher and tourist. The stomach complaint brought back from Egypt, the cold, international design furniture of airport transit lounges and the anguished wait for the next flight have all been part of the continuum of inconclusive tales in which the traveller draws his own image. This is a narrative that is written on the tourist’s own body, as Soile Veijola and Eeva Jokinen have observed. As readers attempt to recognise the meanings contained in the photographs in this book and fill them out with experiences, aspirations and desires of their own, they will become corporal parts of that travel narrative. It is not merely that we go round looking at tourist sights, but that they look at us as well – in the same way as the bottle of beautiful golden sand from the foot of the pyramid of Cheops that now looks down at me from the shelf in my study, sand which carries the smell of the urine of a succession of tourists going back hundreds of years.

(Juha Suonpää: Sacred Places, p. 121-122)

Juha Suonpää (born in Helsinki, Finland in 1963) is a photographer, researcher and teacher who graduated in education from the University of Tampere and gained a doctorate in art from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki. His doctoral thesis Petokuvan raadollisuus (The Beastly Image of the Beast, 2002) was a study of the social significance of nature photography. He is also well known for his earlier prizewinning books Metsä Liikkuu (The Forest is on the Move, 1994) and Luontokuvan totuuden hetki (The Moment of Truth in Nature Photography, 2001). He is now actively engaged in lecturing on photography, writing academic papers on related topics and arranging regular photographic exhibitions in Finland and abroad. He has also gained recognition for his children’s books, teaching materials and documentary films. The recent book and solo exhibition Sacred Places-Pyhät paikat took place at The Contemporary Art Museum Tampere 2007. He is currently principal lecturer in visual culture at Tampere University of Applied Sciences and is doing post-doctoral research at the Finnish Museum of Photography.

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Book also available:
Juha Suonpää: Sacred Places – Pyhät paikat (Maahenki, 2007)
ISBN 978-952-5328-98-1, bound, 128 pages, size 30 cm x 17,62 cm, five colour printing, hardback, finnish/english

Special price during the exhibition: 19,90 €
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For further information and press images, please contact:
Petronella Gronroos, exhibitions co-ordinator / Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, +358 9 612 33 44, firstname.lastname@hippolyte.fi